<$Tuesday, January 22, 2008$>
How to get a credit report that's really free
| Money Smart Life has an unfortunate article up about how to get a free credit report that directs you to Freecreditreport.com. A lot of people make the mistake--including myself--of thinking that this is the web site where you get the free annual credit report that the reporting agencies are required to give you by law, and I'm sure FCR capitalizes on that assumption with all of their advertising. But what they don't make clear when you sign up is that when you register to get your free credit report from them, you're also signing up for their credit monitoring service. If you don't cancel this service within thirty days, they'll start automatically charging your credit card. Last year I was really bad about not checking my statements, and I ended up paying twice the fee for a year (for both my and my husband's reports) without realizing. As soon as I found out I canceled it, but they don't make that process particularly easy, either. That's $310 I unwittingly spent for my "free" credit report. The actual free credit report site, set up by the three major reporting agencies in compliance with federal law, is Annualcreditreport.com. You won't get your credit score, but you will get all three reports with no hidden fees or strings attached. You can get each report once a year, but you don't have to get them all at the same time, which means you can stagger them out and check up on your credit three times a year at no cost. They also provide enough information for you to get a reasonable estimate of your credit score by using the FICO Score Estimator, which is also totally free. Monitoring your credit is a smart thing to do. Just be careful of getting sucked in by misleading advertising. Labels: credit cards, debt reduction, evil, finance+blogs, freebies |
